Guide to Communications Planning

Guide to Communications Planning

Taking a strategic approach to your communications is important because it ensures your external messages align with your business plan and your impact. The approach below is a simple way to start thinking about and designing your communications strategy.

Prior to starting a new communications exercise we want to review what we already know from previous work. These insights might be about the success or failure or previous attempts, or it might be based on knowledge we already have our our customer.

Examples:

Schools, on average, send two students to be part of the programme.

Easter falls in an unusual spot this year, which may lead to fewer applications. As a result we need to reach a wider audience than normal

We need to craft messages that will then achieve the outcomes of the tasks above. To do that we need to think about the problem they are experiencing, how we solve that problem for them, and how we demonstrate our ability to solve it. You need to do this process for each customer segment you are targeting.

Examples:

Their problem (reminder): No one will give me a job because I don’t have any experience.

Our response: Our programme will give you the skills and experience to get a job.

Reason-to-believe: We’ve placed over 30 young people into long-term employment as a result of our programme.